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A decent camera which offers plenty

I love to take pictures and more recently of wildlife and I have a few cameras and to be honest it is a slight obsession of mine to keep buying them.

I love Canon I find they offer the best cameras there is and some might disagree but this cameras the Canon PowerShot A495 is one I really did enjoy using.

My camera is red and I have seen it in grey and even black so there is a few options for colours around for this camera.

The camera on first appearances looks stylish and I think the colour helps make this happen. You have a nice ruby style colour on the front and back and around the rim is the black which sort of separates the back and the front of the camera.

The front is kind of messy with all the logos and information about what the camera is and this perhaps could have been limited. They could have displayed just the Canon logo and it would look decent enough.

On the back there is a 2.5 inch LCD screen to show what pictures you have taken and what you are currently looking at. You have various other buttons as well and these range from zooming in and out, altering if you want to video a scene or take pictures and even editing some pictures there and then.

The 10 megapixels was always a highlight the more megapixels the better and I find that sometimes this is true and sometimes it is not but it does work pretty well. The best example would be a 7mp camera took a picture and so did this camera which is 10mp and you noticed the difference immediately so the sharpness and texture of the picture is much more better. This does not mean all cameras are the same as each will produce different results.

What this camera also has is some decent features like the red eye reduction which is extremely good because most pictures of animals and usually family end up with red eye. Before I had this feature I would discard this picture to the recycle bin and try and produce another masterpiece but this really does remove the red eye which saves me time and effort.

Some of the types of pictures you can take vary with names so you have the portrait picture option which I use for taking pictures of people not up close but close enough. You also you have others like pets and children which is nice because you can fit more people into the picture.

The movies you play if you wish are usually 30fps (frames per second) and this is a good number and it offers a good quality movie at the end which is played in an AVI file. This can also work on DivX DVD players as well should you want to transfer the video over at all.

You have a self timer which allows you to relax and get a pose ready and you have between 2 and 10 seconds for this option as well. You can use SD or SDHC memory cards as well and others which I am not familiar with but people can look up these in the manual.

I found the zoom on this camera very good and sometimes with a camera when you zoom into an image you sort of lose focus and it becomes very blurry and hard to work out what your viewing. With this camera it does happen and once the picture is taken the image is restored back to a normal style.

I used this camera in the dark the other night and usually the flash is on auto unless you change it and I could not see my pet in the dark so I took a picture anyways in the hope something might turn out. The result was great and the quality was exceptional. You could see the cat perfectly and it was almost as if I had taken the picture in normal daylight as well.

I think the weight of the product is around 170g and that includes my two AA batteries I needed to use as well. I was provided with a cable a USB one to get the pictures extracted off the camera to a computer also.

In terms of what the camera offers this is one of the best I have used and it was reduced to £70 from over £135 just a few months ago. The quality of pictures are outstanding and when I print them off there is no blur or loss of focus but just great quality and I would highly recommend this camera to anyone.

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Fantastic price for such a lovely camera

I got this camera recently and it is fab. It has a large screen which is great because my old camera had a really small screen and you could barely see the photo. The screen is 2.5 inches and it really makes taking photos clearer because the screen is so big I can see if people are looking the right way and smiling even from a long distance away. The screen is also very clear and the image on it when you take the picture is very detailed and is very good quality.

This camera is 10.0 mega pixels so does take excellent photos and is extremely good quality photos which are not at all fuzzy.

I have got this camera in red and it really stands out and looks very modern and trendy. Much better than boring black or silver and it the red makes it look a bit special in my opinion.

One of the best things about it is that it takes pictures one after the other very quickly so you don't have to wait too long although it does take a second if you are waiting for the flash but hardly any time at all. It is also quick to turn on with the on/off button and the lens also comes out very quickly so the camera is ready to take a picture straight away. So it is easier to capture those memorable moments with this camera as I found with my old camera that when waiting for the camera to turn on my toddler had usually moved away but with this it is ready to take a picture almost instantly and makes taking photos much more fun.

It also has face detection technology and identifies a person's face on the screen before you take the picture which does make it easier to take a good picture and will even wait for another face so if you want everyone in the picture it will wait until it sees the last person before taking the picture which I think is a really nice touch.

Another good thing about it that makes it very practical and easy to use is that it takes batteries rather than a camera battery. I find this much better because if we are out and the camera needs new batteries we can just buy some so we don't have to wait until we get home to charge it.

It is a very simple and easy to use camera as I have not had to look at the instructions for it at all. The functions on it are easily available and straightforward. The buttons are easy to use to control the different funcations like looking back at photos you have taken or changing the settings.

Another thing I like about this camera is its matt finsh rather than shiny so always looks sleek and clean and doesn't leave finger marks on it. Also it is a nice shape to hold in your hand and also a good size to take a picture. It is not the smallest of cameras as it is quite chunky and is not as thin as some other cameras and don't think I would like to carry it in my pocket as it would stick out too much but that is not a problem for me.

I think it is a good price for a quality camera which takes lovely pictures and is very easy to use and I cannot fault it for the price.